Dennis Ritchie

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.

My father worked for Bell Labs. Hence, I knew very much about the place. I knew it because also he was involved with telephony.

When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.

At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.

The first phase of C was - really, it was two phases in short succession of, first, some language changes from B, really adding the type structure without too much change in the syntax, and doing the compiler. The second phase was slower; it all took place within a very few years, but it was a bit slower, so it seemed.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.